A global distribution system (GDS) is the de facto standard in the airline industry and publishes fares through a variety of different bodies, such as an airline tariff publishing company (ATPCo), SITA, official airline guides (OAG) or appropriate lookalikes. The “standard carrier” is a carrier that publishes its fares to any of the above-mentioned bodies and is linked into the GDS. Amongst these carriers there are full service carriers (FSC) and also airlines categorized as low-cost carriers (LCC).
Ticketless access (TLA) carriers work in a different way, as they do not publish fares but instead price journeys themselves and manage the whole chain from fare quotation to passenger name record (PNR) management. Typically these types of carriers do not produce a paper ticket.
The travel and leisure market has changed significantly in recent times as new providers of content have emerged, mostly through the Internet. This has resulted in a large diversity of methods and tools. In addition, the new content is often not available through any medium other than that designed by the provider of that content, particularly where that provider is relatively new in the marketplace. As a result, end users wishing to find the cheapest air fares must visit a rapidly increasing number of different websites. There is still no guarantee however that this will result in actually finding the most cost-effective solutions fora number of different reasons. Firstly, there is an irreconcilable difference between inputs expected by each provider which makes it difficult for the user to select the best search criteria. In addition, the high variability of business models limits the capability to accurately compare equivalent offers. Finally, meta-searches have significant limitations and often do not provide the full chain of travel for a particular journey or product and do not have access to all the content providers.
FIG. 1 is a diagram of the current state of the art and demonstrates a typical case when an end-user is searching for a travel or leisure solution from several providers. Here the end-user is searching websites for TLA carriers 103, meta-search websites 102, on-line travel agency (OLTA) websites 100, and airline websites 101 via a FSC website. The OLTA and standard carriers are based on a GDS product (104 and 105). The meta-search websites are based on parsing OLTA 106 and airline 107 websites as well as on GDS products 108. In addition the search websites or the OLTA may have some links to certain TLA websites (109, 110 and 111). This may be achieved by parsing or using a direct link. The GDS is typically connected to a centralized provider (112) such as an ATPCo or an OAG. The TLA websites access content provider from respective TLA providers (113).
The FIG. 2 shows a state-of-the-art dataflow demonstrating the different data routes depending on the type of carrier. For a TLA carrier 20 the data passes from a TLA user interface to a TLA data manager 200, TLA solutions 202 and a solutions aggregator 204 in a Low Fare Search (LFS) engine 206. The data from the standard carriers, for example via the FSC or a pioneer carrier (standard carrier 22), passes to a fare and rules databases 208, 210 on the one hand. Whilst on the other hand the flight and availability date passes to flight and availability databases 212, 214. Subsequently, data from the rules and fare databases and the flights and availability databases pass to the universal faring engine 216 and then onto a subsequent FSC and a pioneer solutions database 218 before arriving at a solutions aggregator 204. The format of each different dataflow leads to the creation of a separate recommendation for the TLA carriers and the standard carriers. This is not ideal.
Indeed the prior art leads to certain drawbacks for both the travel vendor and the end-user. In particular the travel vendor has to maintain a number of parallel methods to obtain or book recommendations from different providers. Similarly since there is no vendor capable of offering information relating to all providers, the end-user has to conduct a number of different searches to attempt to compare and contrast differently presented solutions.